Write@Home
Winter 2015

Self-Improvement

Confident businesswoman standing in front of her shadow wearing red cape as a superhero. Business am

Many people believe that individuals are born confident or unconfident. Dr. Ivan Joseph, a sports psychologist and Director of Athletics at Ryerson University in Canada, insisted that confidence can be build by training. Here are five ways anyone can use to build a winning mentality. The first way is ‘repetition, repetition, repetition’. Practicing what you want to advance in your career or personal life patiently and consistently. We will be confident in doing a task or performing a skill if it is not new to us. He states, “Practice, practice, practice. And do not accept failure.”. The second is ‘self-affirmation’. Self-affirmation means stopping ourselves when we have negative inner dialogues. Because our thoughts affect our actions, it is important to convert our thoughts to positive ones to keep going. The third is “getting away from people who tear us down” because those people can trigger your negative thoughts. So, avoid negative energy when you can, and find supportive friendship instead. The fourth is ‘acknowledging what is good’. People tend to thrive when they receive compliments or are reminded of what they’re good. It is important to find a way to appreciate ourselves – especially when we’re having difficult time. We can do that by keeping a list of things which we are good at in our life or good characteristics and read it when we are going through tough times. Finally, we should interpret feedbacks so we can see more benefitted. Self-confident people tend to recognize positive slant on the feedbacks they have. If someone tells that there’s a 98 percent change that they will fail at something, they will interpret that they have 2 percent to be success. And it is enough to encourage them to put more effort to make it comes true.

Reference:
1. The Skill of Self Confidence by Dr. Ivan Joseph at TEDxRyersonU.